BUDAPEST — In the spring of 2012, the Hungarian police came upon a treasure walled in behind a wardrobe in a private home: “Rendezvous of Lovers,” a painting from 1902 by Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka, considered a modern master in Hungary, if largely unknown abroad.

The work, which made headlines in 2006 when it was sold at auction for €910,000, or three times its estimated presale price, had been in a private collection for decades. Its disappearance as part of a million-dollar art heist, and its rediscovery less than two months later, added to its fascination.

This year, “Rendezvous of Lovers” is on view again, at a major exhibition through Dec. 31 in Budapest. The exhibition, “The Lonely Cedar — Csontvary’s Genius,” named in part after another of the artist’s iconic works, groups close to 100 of his paintings, including monumental canvasses rarely seen together.

The fact that so many of Csontvary’s works can be seen at all is itself a curiosity. The Hungarian state, which owns the bulk of the artist’s work, has yet to find a suitable venue to display them together, a matter that is the subject of recurring debate. About a third of his works are hidden from the public eye, after they were lost, stolen or went into private hands.

There is a permanent Csontvary exhibition at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pecs, about 200 kilometers south of Budapest near the border with Croatia. But Csontvary scholars are agitating for the establishment of a dedicated museum in more central Budapest, which the artist had wished for.

“Csontvary has this odd mythology in Hungary, and he’s never shown in one exhibit,” said Gabor Gulyas, the curator of the Budapest show. Bringing the works together in a prestigious venue — the Buda Castle in the heart of the capital — helps make the case for a unified, permanent display that is more accessible to visitors, he said.

Hungarians live in a society increasingly split along political lines, including in the cultural sphere. Csontvary is one of the few artists widely recognized as a national treasure, similar to the composer Franz Liszt or the painter Mihaly Munkacsy.

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“Rendezvous of Lovers,” 1902. The work caused a stir when it was stolen in 2012, then recovered less than two months later.CreditKieselbach Gallery

But Csontvary took a long road to recognition. “Contemporary sources scarcely mention him,” Mr. Gulyas said. “But this did not deter him for a moment: He considered himself a genius.”

In fact, Csontvary seems to have spent as much time on self-promotion as he did on creating art. Lacking critical recognition, he told his own story in self-published autobiographies and catalogues for exhibitions he financed and organized himself.

Despite the abundant autobiographical information Csontvary left behind — or, perhaps, because of it — many aspects of his private life remain obscure. He was born in Kisszeben, a small town in what today is Slovakia. The son of a doctor, he studied pharmacy in Budapest and practiced in Iglo, a town close to his birthplace.

It was there, one day, that he had what he described as an apparition, telling him he would become a great painter.

“From Iglo, I hurried straight onto Rome, where, after several months of study, I came to the conclusion that if I were to work for twenty years, I could catch up with the great masters and even outstrip them,” Csontvary wrote in a catalog for an exhibition in Budapest in 1908.

“When the time comes, my paintings will shine like separate bright stars in the sky,” he wrote.

He was over 40 when he made his forceful entrée into the art world, touring academies from Munich to Paris as a student. His legacy of more than 100 works stands witness to his talent, and to his remarkable willpower in fulfilling the mission he set for himself.

Lajos Nemeth, an art historian and expert on Csontvary, wrote in 1974: “Most of his contemporaries knew only about his strange deeds and eccentric ideas, which they derided. Only a few among them realized that this pharmacist-turned-painter, this self-styled genius who compared himself to Raphael, was indeed so gifted.”

A contrarian by nature, Csontvary did not care to join his contemporaries who settled in other parts of Europe and interacted with the defining movements of the time. The painter Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, for example, owed some of his international renown to his friendship with the French sculptor Aristide Maillol and his work with the avant-garde Nabis group in Paris.

Csontvary, by contrast, “did not belong to any school and his painting conveys an attitude that could be called naïve,” said Tamas Kieselbach, whose gallery in Budapest sold “Rendezvous of Lovers” to a private collector in 2006.

But describing him as naïve would be a false assessment, Mr. Kieselbach said: “His knowledge of painting, his pairing of colors are very professional, but he doesn’t fit into Cubism or Fauvism.”

Rather, he worked alone, traveling and testing new ways to depict nature and light. His journeys brought him to Sicily, where in 1904 he created a monumental canvas rendering burning skies over the Greek ruins of Taormina by the sea.

Seeking the sun, which became an obsession, he went into more unchartered territory. He spent the spring of 1903 in Mostar, Herzegovina, then under Austro-Hungarian control, where he captured the Ottoman-era limestone bridge arching over the emerald-colored Neretva river. Almost a century later, that same bridge was obliterated in the Yugoslav war.

But it was in Lebanon’s historic cedar forest that he found his most famous inspiration: the trees. “They inhabit the same forest and do not encroach upon each other, but live in peace in the midst of the vicissitudes of time, through the providence of God and nature,” he wrote in 1908. “Couldn’t we in Europe live in peace on the same basis?”

Two of the cedar canvasses from 1907, “Solitary Cedar” and “Pilgrimage to the Cedars of Lebanon,” rarely shown together, can be seen side by side in the Budapest exhibition.

After his death in 1919 at 65, success came to Csontvary in the form of studies and official exhibitions, but also copies and counterfeits. Although he sold few paintings during his lifetime, a handful of works, sold by his heirs, exist on the Hungarian art market, fetching extravagant prices when they do appear. A number of works also disappeared, prompting a public call, as the exhibition in Budapest was being organized, for anyone with knowledge of them to come forward. Symbolically, these are shown in a room full of blank canvasses.

Mr. Kieselbach said that Csontvary had to be seen in order to take his place in the history of European modernism. Many contend that the museum in Pecs, which was briefly in the spotlight in 2010 when the town was the European Capital of Culture, is too remote. And the costly transport of his fragile canvasses to Budapest has prompted speculation that the works would in fact never return, pending the opening of an eventual Csontvary museum in the capital.

“To me, these works come alive when one is confronted with them in person,” Mr. Kieselbach said.